Simply Unforgettable

Brock Street

, he had not known where he was going.

He had certainly not known why.

Or had he?

He gazed out the window with unseeing eyes, looking back wistfully on the time, not too long ago, when his life had been uncomplicated and perfectly satisfactory.

Well, it would be satisfactory again, dash it all.

It would.

He had promised to find the perfect bride.

But there was more than one kind of perfection.

He paid their way into Sydney Gardens, just on the other side of the road at Sydney Place, and they walked along beside a bowling green until the path wound upward, twisting and turning as it did so between lawns and among trees whose branches swayed and tossed in the wind.

It was not by any means an ideal day for strolling in any park. There was not another soul in sight apart from the two of them.

Frances shivered even though she was dressed warmly—in the exact cloak and bonnet and half-boots she had been wearing the first time she met him, in fact, she realized suddenly. She felt chilled to the bone, but not so much from the buffeting of the weather as from the fact that she was actually walking here beside him again, one day after she thought he had returned to London, two days after they had said good-bye forever—again.

She had already lived through a day of pain so intense that it had seemed like stark despair. Was she to have to endure the same all over again later today and tomorrow?

Would he never go away and stay away?

Would she never have the resolve to send him away and mean it?

She had received a card with the morning post from Mrs. Lund, Mr. Blake’s sister, inviting her to join Mr. Lund and herself at the theater next week. Mr. Blake was to be of the party too, she had added. Although Frances had hesitated, she had written back to accept. Life had to continue, she had reasoned. And perhaps now she would finally be able to put the past behind her and concentrate her attention upon the man who seemed eager to be her beau. It was not as if she had to make any final decision about him yet. She did not even have to tell him everything about herself yet. It was merely an evening at the theater to which she had been invited.

She had congratulated herself—again—upon her good sense. But here she was, just a few hours later, walking in Sydney Gardens with Lucius Marshall—who was soon to marry a Miss Portia Hunt.

“For someone who had something important to say,” she said, breaking a lengthy silence, “and who was granted merely one hour of my time, you are remarkably silent, Lord Sinclair.”

They walked onto a brightly painted and exquisitely carved Chinese bridge and paused for a few moments to gaze down into the slate-gray waters of the canal below. Under different circumstances, she was half aware, she would be feasting her senses on all the beauty that surrounded them, inclement weather notwithstanding.

“Do you believe in fate, Frances?” he asked her.

She considered her answer. Did she?

“I do believe in coincidence,” she said. “I believe that some unexpected things happen to catch our attention, and that what we do with those moments might affect or change the whole course of our life. But I do not believe we are blown about helplessly by a fate over which we have no control. There would be no point in free will if that were so. We all have the power to decide, to say yes or no, to do something or not to do it, to go in this direction or that.”

“Do you believe,” he asked her, “that the whole course of your life brought you to that snow-clogged road when it did, and that the whole course of my life brought me to the same place at the same time? And do you believe that coincidence as you call it willed it so? Or that in some quite unconscious way we did ourselves? Was it perhaps not simple, random accident that it was you who were there and not some other woman, or that it was me and not some other man?”

The strange, unlikely possibility made her feel breathless. Could life really be that . . . deliberate?

“You were warned that it would snow,” she said. “You might have chosen not to travel that day. I had seen all the signs of an approaching storm for days. I might have waited to see what would happen.”

“Precisely,” he said. “Either one of us or both could have heeded the warnings and warning signs, which appear to have deterred every other intended traveler in that area. But neither of us did. Has it struck you as curious that we met no one else on that road? That no one else stopped at that inn?”

No, it had not. She had never thought of it. But she thought of it now. She had wanted to set out earlier that morning, but her great-aunts had persuaded her to sit an extra hour with them over breakfast. If she had left when she had intended, she would very probably never have met him.

How she wished she had set out earlier!

Or did she?

What was he trying to say, anyway?

He set out along the path again, and she fell into step beside him. He did not offer his arm. He had not done so since they left the school, in fact. She was thankful for it. But she did not need to touch him in order to feel him with every fiber of her being.

Was it possible, she wondered, that it was not just the fact that she had lain with him that drew her so powerfully to him, that had made it impossible to forget him, that had made her life an agony during the past few days? She had loved before. Surely she had loved Charles. But she had never felt quite like this.

They walked onward in silence again. They still had not encountered anyone else since entering Sydney